Great Scenes… Grosse Pointe Blank

A gun in a brown bag, omelette technicalities and jokes about dead dogs. John Cusack and Dan Ackroyd sit down for breakfast. Pull up a chair.

The humble diner is the setting of many a great scene in American cinema and they don’t come much funnier, or cooler, than this segment from the terrific Grosse Pointe Blank. George Armitage’s 1997 film is an action movie, a high school reunion flick and a romance rolled into one big fun-packed ball, complete with rapid-fire dialogue and the quintessential John Cusack performance.

Thankfully for us, Cusack’s anxious hitman Martin Q Blank is given a great foil in Dan Ackroyd’s Grocer, who just wants to do two things in life: kill people and have a union where people who kill people can talk about how they kill people. But Blank isn’t buying it, and in this very funny head-to-head he explains why: ‘Loner. Lone gunman, geddit?’

Not only is this scene a rib-tickler, it also gives us an insight into how highly strung you can become if you choose to murder people for a living. There is an uneasy kinship between Blank and Grocer as they discuss other hitmen (Ackroyd’s phrasing of ‘some Basque-whacker from the Pyrenees’ is beautiful) and what drugs they have been prescribed to keep them focused.

It’s the little details that make it interesting, from Grocer forlornly leaning his head against the wall to his very graphic description of what he would insert in the hole in Blank’s head after he has put a bullet through it. The performances are perfect and the dialogue is brilliant. Nice talk, sugar mouth.

The fight scene between Cusack and the assassin in the school hallway while MIRROR IN THE BATHROOM by THE ENGLISH BEAT is playing in the background. It provides such a great rhythm to a well-choreographed fight scene.